CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign art history professor Hermann von Hesse has been awarded a 2024 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship.
Von Hesse is one of 60 scholars selected through a rigorous, multi-stage peer review process from 1,100 applicants, according to an ACLS news release. The fellowships were awarded to early-career, untenured scholars, and they provide up to $60,000 for 6-12 months of sustained research and writing. The ACLS Fellowship Program supports scholars with the potential to make original and significant contributions in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
The award will support von Hesse’s project “Love of Stone Houses”: Urban Merchants, Ancestral Spaces and Sacred Objects on Africa’s Gold Coast, 1700-1890, which broadens African and African Atlantic histories and art histories beyond their stereotypical focus on trade goods and sacred relics often associated with African material cultures (especially in the Western imagination) toward property and real estate. Fortified stone houses not only housed ancestors and living kin but also functioned as commercial centers and attracted local, regional and international trade.
The project examines how Gold Coast merchant families increasingly collateralized their sacred stone houses and material goods to secure European credit on imported merchandise during the transition away from the transatlantic slave trade. These transformations partly shaped Gã and Fante ideas of value, security, power and vulnerability. This research is the first in African and African diaspora studies to historicize the house as an embodied space of overlapping ancestral and physical security and advances broader understandings of materiality that varied across African cultures and pasts.
Von Hesse previously received a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for the project.
ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 80 scholarly organizations and a leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The ACLS Fellowship Program is funded primarily through ACLS’s endowment, which has benefited from contributions by the Mellon Foundation, the Arcadia Charitable Trust, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS Research University Consortium and private donors.
Editor’s note: To contact Hermann von Hesse, email vonhesse@illinois.edu.
